We counted up the cowslips on
a very sunny Saturday 1 June - we being me, Barbara, Helen and Dieter
assisted by Lucy the dog - and we found around 450 flowers setting
seed. See here for what they look like : http://www.wildlifebcn.org/
About two-thirds of these are on the small orchid meadow mowed in
the autumn by the Wildlife Trust volunteers and the other third on
the meadow mowed in July just before the folk festival camping. There
are probably more on the camping field, scattered in the high grass.
Interestingly although there were around a hundred rosettes of leaves on
the southern side, none of these had surviving flowers and many were
very small and grazed. There are none anywhere else on the entire
remaining grazed common - but prove me wrong if you can.
I looked online to see why there might be more cowslips in some
areas than others and came across this very erudite article in the
Journal of Applied Ecology [ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.
What the research shows is that early grazing is very bad for
cowslips, causing serious long-term declines, but that autumn cutting is
an excellent choice with summer cutting someway behind. This fits
exactly with where the surviving cowslips are on the common with most on
the autumn cut areas.
This seems very positive evidence that not only is management of
parts of Coldham's Common possible without grazing, but that the
present grazing management ( putting too many cows on too early ) is
probably causing a long-term decline in those emblematic species that we
treasure so much.
We are going to do further surveys for the pyramidal orchids [http://www.plantlife.org.uk/
We are going to ask City Council to take more account of wildlife
in their management of the common and keep cows off the existing
ungrazed areas to protect them.
